No toys today, but, here, have an image I put together for the Transformers Wiki.  Considering how frequently the animation studios mixed up their Hot Rods and Rodimuses, a visual guide to their differences seems like it'd be a good idea.  Monzo provided me some scans of some colored character models from old Japanese magazines, but I wanted something a little less grainy and a little more, uh, accurate.  So I took their character model lineart and colored it myself by eyedropping colors from select episodes.  Some episodes were by crappy animation companies, so I avoided those, as they had different color palettes and sometimes colored things wrong.

So, hey, Hot Rod is pretty pink.  It's kinda funny that, as he gets older, he gets more desaturated.  I say it's funny because when you die in Transformers, you turn gray.  So this is like a subtle commentary on aging.   You're halfway dead!  Kup also desaturated with age, so it's not just Hot Rod who has his mortality written all over him in Prismacolor.

(The ancient, bearded sage Alpha Trion, even in modern times, is bright purple and red.  When he was a kid, I bet you couldn't look at him without burning your retinas.  He was a walking lense flare.)

I scaled the models to each other according to how they're depicted in the animation materials.  (I've got a lot of this crazy stuff on my hard drive.)  So their relative heights are accurate, at least to that one height chart.

My favorite detail is the crotch.  Why?  Because it's their windshield and roof.  That's where the passenger cabin is intended to go during the transformation to robot mode.  If any toy ever attempted it, it'd basically look like Hot Rod or Rodimus is wearing a huge diaper, so I can understand why their toys shy away from that.

Hope you enjoyed character-design geeking with me.